WARNING:  This is a no-edit zone. . .

The election is now over, and the bottom line is that regardless of how it went, half of Americans were going to be disappointed because their slate of candidates would not be in office.

We are by nature a wild mix of people.  We have different ideas, different attitudes, different beliefs.  And we have different preferred paths for reaching our different objectives.

This isn’t anything new.  What is new is our anxiety about it.  Until this time, there has been a mindset of respecting others’ views and opinions–those with which we agree and those with which we do not.

There has been a prevailing thought that we must be fair.  Not right, not just, not make judgments seated in faith and values, but in fairness.  The challenge is that we haven’t collectively decided on a definition of fairness.  And fairness as we typically define it has been in short supply.

Today is, as each day is, a new day that offers a new opportunity.  In this one, I suggest we start with being still.  “Be still and know that I am God” the Bible says.

In that we trust.  God is our strength, our hope and our future.

We’ve stood by and watched our freedom of religion rights diminish.  We’ve allowed it because someone else defined what was and wasn’t “fair.”   So the blame for that erosion is ours.  Whether in apathy, busy-ness, indifference, or fear of offending some arbitrary other, we did it.

So first we should be still, and then we must adopt our own definitions and stand behind them.

Blessings,

Vicki

c2008, Vicki Hinze